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Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Word of the Year

Lots of writers are posting their words for the year. Looking at my January Action Plan, it's
pretty clear what my word of the year is.

REVISE!

Confession to my critique groups: I still haven't done the
revisions on the last, oh, 12 stories you've critiqued. Yep, my bad.
This fall I have been struggling just to get manuscripts ready for critique each month. This makes me feel very guilty. If I were a dog, I'd have
my tail between my legs. The Emotion Thesaurus
tells me people show guilt by blushing, sweating and staring down at my feet. (Handy book, that is!)

And I value the critique so much, that it's like I was given
a bag of gold, but haven't molded into rings yet. Just a big bag of shiny metal
sitting in my closet patiently waiting to be honed into beauty. And that's the kind of thing that attracts pirates, and I'm so not in the mood for a pirate attack.

Ah yes, a good pair of old scissors.
Just perfect to cut all those adjectives.(image by asifthebest via sxc.hu)

So I needed to get my butt in my writing chair, but how? Well, I had to trick myself, which isn't
that hard since I'm quite gullible.

How dare she? I thought. How
dare she wake me out of my holiday coma to actually write?

So, I plopped in my chair like a snotty sophomore whose Mom said
she couldn't watch Teen Wolf until her homework was done. I may have even been loudly popping Hubba
Bubba bubbles. It took, like, forever to pick out an idea and to coax my
fingers to move. But then 250 words later, I had to apologize under my breath
to Julie for being such a brat. J Just. Writing. Anything. Feels. Awesome!

January 12th starts Meg Miller's ReViMo which features 7 days of picture book revision. It's just what I need to really make some head way through my critique
pile.

11 comments:

Revise. That's been my word of the day for a very long time. I haven't started a brand new project since 2012. Ack. I'm beginning to wonder if I even remember how! Btw, I love the Emotion Thesaurus--and my copy of The Positive Trait Thesaurus just arrived in the mail today. Yay. :) Happy writing, Lauri.

Adding Positive Trait Thesaurus to my goodreads now. You need to reward yourself with a free write session for every few hours or pages of revisions. Just think how much better your revisions will be if you give your brain a little break!

I recommend the Artist Dates method! Reward yourself for revising by getting B.O.O.C. (butt out of chair) and go someplace inspiringOrMove your writing out of the kitchen /office /hideyhole and take up your red pen in an artistically stimulating setting

Wait you mean like actually go somewhere nice by myself just for me? CRAZY! I need to schedule that in. Actually I just need to schedule. I am very good about having an action plan and to do list, but I think to be productive in 2014, I need a hard core schedule. Every 5 hours of butt in chair earns one hour of butt out of chair perhaps.

Lauri Meyers is a children's writer living part-time in New
Jersey and part-time in the fantasy worlds she builds in her head. She is a member of the SCBWI. She
enjoys laughing until her sides hurt and making other people laugh until
organic milk squirts out of everyone's noses. She left corporate finance due to the infrequency of milk fountains.